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Pen in One Hand, Cricket Bat in the Other

There are no longer any Staten Islanders in the Staten Island Cricket Club, one of the country’s oldest. The members are from places like Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, St. Vincent and Grenada. There are just two Europeans; one of them, Joseph O’Neill, a 44-year-old Irishman who grew up in the Netherlands, was educated at Cambridge but has lived in New York since 1998.

That Mr. O’Neill in his other life happens to be a novelist is a matter of indifference to most of his teammates. They’re more interested in him as an accomplished batsman, a sure-handed fielder and a decent off-speed bowler. He’s also handy at contributing articles to the club bulletin.

He has clung to cricket, he said recently, because it’s his “athletic mother tongue,” and to learn baseball, say, would be like taking up a foreign language. Even if he became proficient, he wouldn’t get the jokes or the poetry.

The other European on the team is Raymond King, an Englishman who works for Verizon and has played with the club for 20 years after being turned down by a team run by the British Consulate. “I get more from chatting with these fellows than I did with my fellow Brits,” he said recently. “I love hearing the stories of different parts of the world. No matter what our religious, cultural differences, the love of cricket overcomes all that.”

Mr. O’Neill’s new book, “Netherland” (Pantheon), identifies the Staten Island Cricket Club by name, though not any of its players, and there’s a long description of Walker Park, the club’s home ground since 1876, a bumpy, crabgrass-ridden expanse just a block from the Kill Van Kull. It’s bordered now by tennis courts, a baseball field, a children’s playground and, beyond a chain-link fence, some Victorian houses that are occasionally bombarded by cricket balls, little red meteors crashing through front windows or cratering into flower beds.

“Netherland,” Mr. O’Neill’s third novel, is the story of Hans van den Broek, a Dutch investment banker working in New York, who after the 9/11 attacks finds himself exiled to the Chelsea Hotel, where, as it happens, Mr. O’Neill lives with his wife, Sally Singer, an editor at Vogue, and their three sons. (They make a cameo appearance in the novel, a “family with three boys who ran wild in hallways with tricycles and balls and trains.”)

After Hans’s British wife leaves him and takes their child back to England, he finds solace in an unlikely friendship with a Trinidadian wheeler-dealer named Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreams of starting a pro cricket league in New York. And he finds a second home in the subculture of New York cricket, a world at once exotic and familiar to him from his own cricketing days in The Hague.

The idea of publishing a novel in the United States about cricket gave him commercial qualms but not artistic ones, Mr. O’Neill said in an e-mail message. “You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations,” he added. “And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.”

New York cricket is “bush cricket,” one of the characters in the book complains, played on wickets of cocoa mat instead of grass and on weedy, substandard pitches, where to score a run you need to bat the ball in the air instead of elegantly along the fast ground of a proper pitch. But it has a charm of its own and is played with unusual devotion, in remote corners of the city, by a surprisingly large number of people unable or unwilling to shed their cricketing heritage.

On a recent Saturday morning Staten Island played a “friendly,” or informal, match against the Cosmos, a Queens club with a number of Jamaican players but captained by a Guyanese, Ashmul Ali. The players took the field clad all in white. (Many of the Staten Islanders were also wearing the club sweater, a sleeveless V-neck embroidered with the motto “Lude Ludum Insignia Secundaria,” which means “winning matters less than playing the game,” or something like that.)

The umpires strode out, wearing floppy hats and white jackets that looked liked lab coats. And the president and tutelary spirit of the Staten Island Cricket Club, a tall, courtly Trinidadian named Clarence Modeste, bowled a ceremonial first ball, taking a running start and tossing a straight-armed lob at the stumps. Mr. Modeste’s exact age is a club mystery. All that is known for sure is that he was born before World War II and is old enough to be the father of everyone else on the team. His best bowling days, in truth, are probably behind him.

Photo

Joseph ONeill plays with the Staten Island Cricket Club and has incorporated the club in his new novel, Netherland.Credit
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

On the sidelines, near the Walker Park field house, a slate-roofed Tudor-style building, players and onlookers sipped tea and nibbled Parle-G biscuits from India. They cheered, hollered and called out to those on the field in the lilting accent of the islands, the clipped vowels of Guyana, the lyrical syntax of Hindi-inflected English: “Well thinking, guys! Well thinking.” “Nicely batted!” “Lovely cricket — lovely!”

Passers-by took little notice. But if they had, they would have seen an odd and captivating little trace of empire: windmilling bowlers, batsmen in white leg pads, fielders chasing down a bouncing red ball — former colonials playing Britain’s game in yet another former colony, one where cricket has all but disappeared from the collective memory.

Mr. O’Neill led off the batting for Staten Island, hitting some nice cuts and sweeps, a couple of long balls, even a delicate backward slice before being “run out” after scoring a disappointing 21. He was picked off base, as it were, trying to eke out a run where there wasn’t one, and afterward he was taken aside by Habib Rehman, one of the team’s top batsmen, who was keeping score.

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Mr. Rehman drives a yellow cab in his other life and is so devoted to cricket that he has been known to play late at night with his fellow cabbies, under parking lot floodlights and using a tennis ball.

“I saw you panicking,” Mr. Rehman told Mr. O’Neill. “When you bat, you have to make sure patience is the key. Just play him and wait.”

The match was played under a set of streamlined rules known as Twenty20, intended to end a contest in three hours or so, and, eager to score runs early, the Staten Islanders instead dug themselves into a hole. The second batsman was bowled out almost immediately. A little later, the captain and wicket keeper, Don Sakhichand, returned, shaking his head, after also being bowled out. “I honestly couldn’t tell you what happened,” he said.

After just 17 overs (the cricket equivalent of an inning, roughly) the team was all out with 117 runs, a very meager score to defend. And things got worse when the Cosmos came to bat.

Mr. Sakhichand had devised a dubious strategy of sending out his weaker bowlers first and keeping what Mr. O’Neill called the “more fearsome” ones in reserve, and it immediately backfired. Balls went wide (scoring an automatic run for the opposition), easy balls were muffed by fielders, and several hard-hit ones crashed off the fence for automatic 6s. The first two Cosmos batsmen retired voluntarily, and after just 11 overs, with only one batsman out, the club coasted to 118 and an easy victory.

Some of the graybeards on the sidelines nevertheless found something to complain about, as elders so often do, in cricket as in any other sport.

“These guys, they don’t know what running is all about,” one man said. “These youths, their minds are taken up with other things.”

The man sitting next to him agreed: “Young men — them lazy!”

Mr. O’Neill made light of the loss, saying that it was early in the season; there was another, more serious match the next day, and some of the players were eager to get home to their wives and families. A little earlier he had explained: “When I met my American wife, I presented myself as a cricketer. I didn’t want to have to have any retrospective discussion. All these guys are in the same boat; it’s a negotiation.”

He added: “But these guys are my family too. If I were to get hit by a truck, they are the ones who would be there for me.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Pen in One Hand, Cricket Bat in the Other. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe